


"Among such fears as these, my lord, there is little room for you."

by rocknlobster



Category: Rai-Kirah - Carol Berg
Genre: Hope vs. Despair, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Introspection, Navel-Gazing, Other, POV First Person, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 14:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17024745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rocknlobster/pseuds/rocknlobster
Summary: Four times Seyonne despaired, and one time he hoped. (Set toward the beginning of the first book.)





	"Among such fears as these, my lord, there is little room for you."

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cirilla9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cirilla9/gifts).



The first time I felt despair was when Ezzaria fell. We knew that evil was real and present in the world — I had fought it in the shape of demons many times — but life was paramount to us, and we fought evil to save people even at cost to ourselves. To lose it all felt like the end of the world, even though the world has probably not changed much since then, though my place in it certainly has. I always knew how important melydda was, but it was only when my power was lost to me forever...how can I describe it? When all your life you have one purpose and then that purpose is taken from you, there is a blackness that opens and spreads in your mind, a sort of void that nothing can fill or satisfy. I saw many desperate people throw themselves into it, and never come out. I chose to survive, and built a wall around it. I followed the advice of that man, whose name I never learned, from the first few months of my captivity. Don’t think about the past. Only when your hands are wrinkled and mottled with age can you allow yourself to remember the past.

In the years of slavery and degradation which came after, I am sure that I felt despair any number of times. For one unfamiliar with humiliation and torment, as I was, each new piece of suffering felt like the worst thing that had ever befallen me. But before too long, maybe a few years, I came to understand that everything can change, in an instant, entirely beyond my control or ability to foretell, or forestall. Any instance in which I caught myself thinking that this surely was the worst that life could offer me, I pulled back and chastised myself for thinking beyond the moment. I knew in any case, by my own reluctant observation of torture and destruction, that there was so much more that lay in wait did I but misspeak, misstep, find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was simply no time for such luxuries as despair.

***

That was before I looked into the Khelid’s eyes, at that thrice-accursed dinner the Prince held, Aleksander in all his cleverness. Never look the guests in the eye! If only I had suppressed the small spark of curiosity, to see the face of a new race, a people I had never seen before. Who was it, so favored by the Emperor yet disturbing to his trusted brother, Dmitri? Who was it that vexed the Prince into the very indiscretions which brought me to my current state, kneeling beside a demon and serving him at table? Not that I could have known or even remotely guessed that he was a demon until I saw his eyes.

Truly, I had believed myself beyond despair, until I felt a wave of it pass through me as I recognized the demon, along with panic at the simultaneous knowledge that, thanks to the rites of Baltar, I could do nothing to attack or to defend against its evil. Even after all I had suffered, the training was so deep, so spinal, that I wanted to fight, to warn them; surely there must still be someone worth saving. But in these intervening years, for nearly half my life, I had undergone a new training: that to care for others carried a greater danger than floggings or nights spent alone in a dark hole. Looking back I know that I cared anyway; it was written into the fabric of so many of my actions, small and large. But to care on the level of some Larger Purpose, this was beyond me in that moment as I knelt and washed the hands of the dinner guests, a symbol to them of the mistake they had made in trusting the flatteries and gifts of one Aleksander, Prince of the Derzhi.

***

With the constant threat and knowledge of the demon hanging over me in the despair of my helpless state, even then I rebalanced. Sleep returned, when my duties allowed it. Focus on the present moment, only the present moment. But Llyr... by all the gods I swear some part of me believed I was the only remaining Ezzarian, excepting whatever few survived as slaves beside myself, and when we died so would die our vows and sacred duties, all of it. I _wanted_ to believe that some escaped, that our desperate plan worked. Yet it was only when I was presented with proof positive that some _had_ survived and escaped, in the person of Llyr, who was a child or perhaps yet unborn at the destruction of Ezzaria, only when I saw this proof did I realize how deep was my fear and how dark my unvoiced despair at the destruction of my people. And on top of this, the renewed despair of my early years as a slave, watching myself in a mirror go through it all again.

This was a despair that took root, took hold. It left me shaking with rage and unable to control my speech when goaded by Aleksander to tell him what I really thought...that his supreme arrogance would ruin a man and his entire family because he was bored, because a lute player plucked one sour note. When the Prince said, “How dare you speak to me thus?” I wanted to reply, “Because you have done _more_ than destroy a sweet green land with good people; you have done _more_ than hurt and torment the very innocent and vulnerable people from all places whom you should protect. You have done these things and not even _noticed_. You have no care for anyone except yourself, and you lack the wit to even properly look out for your own interests, ignorant as you are of the long memory for hurt that plagues most people, and privileged as you are by your birth to ignore their hurts and grudges except when it suits you.”

But instead I said, “I do only as you command, my lord.” And he saw me shaking with rage but only said, “Get out. And bring a civil tongue tomorrow or you’ll have no hands with which to write.” Only said! That such threats were so normal to me by now that this seemed a mercy is the saddest irony of all.

***

When the Prince remembered his displeasure with me the following day, I realized my despair was vast, and the gulf beneath me was impossibly deep. Perhaps I fought to remain alive all these years _because_ of the part of me that believed I was the last of my kind. Perhaps now that I _knew_ I was not the last, that there were Ezzarians alive and out there in the world, there was no reason to keep fighting. _Gaenad zi._ I no longer believed in gods and corruption, not like I used to, but melydda was real. Demons were real. Evil was real. Yet now I was doubly powerless to fight evil, a slave and without my power. Was the fight worth it? When I looked at Llyr it was like seeing myself in a mirror. All the same horror, disgust, and desperation. He couldn’t stand to live with himself, despite his childhood training or whatever instincts of self-preservation may have penetrated his despair. The same wrongs, perpetuated on a new generation, over and over. New nations conquered and peoples enslaved. New individuals drawn into the web of pain. What was the point of it all? Perhaps it would truly be best for Aleksander to drop whatever small curiosity about me he possessed and kill me there and then.

And in the grasp of this new depth of despair, I voiced my fears and shifted my vision to see what sort of man would be my end.

***

I was blinded by light. Whether there were such things as gods I could no longer say, but I knew there was good in the world as well as evil. From the Prince’s soul radiated a seed of goodness so pure and intense that I knew immediately it was the feadnach. What else could it have been, a light like that in the soul of someone who had done so much harm, caused so much pain and suffering? This was a mark that defied every expectation and assumption I had about the world. Whether it was gods who put this mark on Aleksander’s soul, or whether it was some other working of fate or the world defying reasonable expectations...there it was. And suddenly I saw it all so clearly.

Sixteen years I survived and kept mostly out of the worst to which a slave could aspire. I came into the Prince’s possession because I would not compromise what I thought of as one of my few remaining points of honor. Now I see that I had much honor remaining; even when I tried to act in my own self-interest, I acted to help others at potential cost to myself. I believe it is a true saying, that the character of a man is most revealed when he has the least to gain and the most to lose from acting generously or nobly. It was in this way that I saw hints of the character of Aleksander, rare moments as they were at that time.

I had seen those hints in him, even as I had born the cost of his temper, his mistakes. Now I had irrefutable evidence that those hints were part of a shining potential for true greatness, one which I was oathbound to nurture and protect. I found that my oath held true. I found that whatever despair and fear I felt, I too had a purpose now, as inscrutable perhaps as the existence of the feadnach in a Derzhi royal. As incredulous, frustrated, and helpless as I felt in that moment...I wonder if I also felt curiosity, at what strange new world lay ahead.

Whatever I felt, it was enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays! This is perhaps a bit milder than your usual fare, but I hope you enjoyed the little window into Seyonne's inner rambling self-awareness.


End file.
